Phone Service Vote Delayed

May 28, 1998|By SUSAN E. KINSMAN; Courant Staff Writer

State regulators Wednesday acknowledged what consumer advocates and potential competitors have been saying for months -- that technical problems are stalling statewide competition for local telephone service.

The state Department of Public Utility Control suspended indefinitely a statewide ballot that was supposed to give Connecticut residents a choice of local service providers.

The reason: The competing companies are not ready to deliver the service, and won't be until critical equipment, service and pricing problems are resolved.

No one knows when that will happen. Estimates range from three months to a year or more.

What the delay means for Connecticut telephone users, particularly residential customers, is little or no choice of providers for local dial tone service.

Southern New England Telephone controlled the market as a regulated utility, and competitors fear that the delay is giving an unfair advantage to SNET America Inc., an unregulated subsidiary of Southern New England Telecommunications Corp.

State regulators, however, refused to block SNET America from marketing for local customers until the ballot takes place.

Jack R. Goldberg, the lead commissioner on the decision, said he was ``very unhappy'' about the delays, and hoped to solve the technical problems within 90 days and reschedule the vote.

Goldberg said he may cancel the ballot altogether if the competing companies are not able to work out their differences. ``I'm not going to put the reliability of the public telephone system at risk,'' he said.

If the ballot is canceled, Goldberg said, the regulators would also take another look at the decision that allowed SNET to restructure into regulated wholesale and unregulated retail companies.

The ballot was proposed as a way to give competing companies an equal shot at the estimated $90 billion local exchange market in Connecticut, which SNET dominates.

The decision Wednesday stemmed from a petition filed by MCI Telecommunications Corp. that asks regulators to establish a firm timetable for completing the work necessary for competition, and to impose penalties on companies that failed to meet those deadlines.

The utility control department's decision did neither, but Goldberg said he would rule on all of the issues raised by the petition soon.

Carl Giesy, MCI's regional director for competition policy, said that ``suspending the ballot indefinitely was not what we wanted. We wanted a strict timeline. What this means is that SNET is able to continue to drag its feet on what is necessary for effective balloting.''

Giesy said effective competition in Connecticut is ``at least a year away with a lot of hard work.''

SNET expects to have its operational support system -- one of the key elements of competition -- ready for regulatory review July 1, said Kevin Moore, an SNET spokesman.

``It is vitally important for balloting to occur with the least disruption to customers as possible. Delay seems appropriate to give the parties extra time to work out all the issues,'' Moore said.

He denied that SNET was the cause of the delay. ``This is a tremendously complicated process. From the beginning, folks did not understand the enormous complexity in creating the systems for this to work seamlessly,'' he said.